Comment on The current state of auto insurance: shit that belongs on a shady Kickstarter from 2013
StaySquared@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Car tech today spies on you. Manufacture of said car collects that date and then sells it to lexisnexis, who then sells that data to auto insurance companies. Which in turn analyze the data and determine to upcharge you for your driving.
They’ll never lower the rate, they’ll just keep raising it until you finally become a pirate and drive dirty.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is only true if the insurance companies are colluding and are actively stopping anyone else entering the market.
If one companies rates are too high then customers will go elsewhere.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
If you undercut your opponents too much then you are just leaving money on the table and are susceptible to being bought out
StaySquared@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Oh for sure you’ll have to move to another insurance company to hopefully get a better rate. But your current insurance company, never ever lowers the rate unless you had tickets in the recent past and those tickets fell off your record. That’s the only time I’ve ever experience my rate lower and it was roughly $40 less per month.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Outside the US there is a no claims bonus /discount that lowers the rate if you drive without accident.
StaySquared@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah supposedly we in the U.S. have this… but it’s BS. Or maybe the option does exist but I was never given a discount with a clean driving record of 8 years.
HelixDab2@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
The cost of entering the market is so high that it’s functionally impossible for any new carriers to enter the market without having major investor backing. The only way to make the cost reasonable for most people is to have a very large risk pool; you can’t get a large risk pool without having a lot of people signing up, which means already having the infrastructure in place to handle that kind of numbers.
If you insure, say, 1000 people, and 999 of them are incredibly safe drives, and one of them drives drunk and kills a busload of school children–costing the insurer a “mere” $1,000,000 because that was the limit of their liability–that means that every person in that risk pool needs to pay $1000 annually for that single accident, and that’s just to break completely even, without accounting for any of the overhead involved in running an insurance company.